ALETHEIA

JS Breukelaar’s ALETHEIA is one of the finest, strangest novels I’ve read in a long time. There’s bone and blood magic in it, and it drips strangeness. (Angela Slatter, The Bones Remember Everything* )

Categories

Meta

THank you to Canadian author Maria Haskins for her kind words about meh book:

Like a steam-train, it gathers momentum in the telling, and while the first chapters draw you into the world of the story, allowing you to get to know the characters, everything soon takes a turn I did not see coming. And towards the end, the story is just edge-of-your-seat GRIPPING. Horror and landscape mix with memory and desire in a way that is riveting.

Horror makes us children again, in the best possible way. We’re incredibly resilient when we’re kids, because our imaginations are so vast, so powerful. They cannot be defeated. When we go through bad things, we have the emotional intelligence to recover, because we know that anything can happen. If there can be monsters under the bed then there can be miracles, too.

All these stories instill a kind of terror in the reader, but the kind of terror where the fever dream is not so much to defeat It, as to see It, touch It. Make It stick. Because without It, what are we?

Vale Harlan Ellison. You mattered to me. I included his 1965 story, “Repent Harlequin, said the Ticktock Man” in my favorite dystopian stories over at LitReactor.

This is the cover for the upcoming collection. I love it, and thanks in tonnage to the folks at Meerkat for a cover that reveals as much as it conceals. Read more about the collection here.

A collection of six of J.S. Breukelaar’s darkest, finest stories plus six new works, including the uncanny new novella, “Ripples on a Blank Shore.” Relish the gothic strangeness of “Union Falls,” the alien horror of “Rogues Bay 3013,” the heartbreaking dystopia of “Glow,” the weird mythos of “Ava Rune.” Plus an introduction by award-winning author, Angela Slatter. It’s clear that this collection from the author of American Monster and the internationally acclaimed and Aurealis Award finalist, Aletheia, announces a new and powerful voice in fantastical fiction.

The “Yes” just in my inbox yesterday – super super psyched to be picked up by this smart mag out of the UK, and for a story about snake beans! Thanks to Andy Cox from TTA Press for digging it, heaven-sent beta reader, Angela Slatter and the Thorbys crowd who workshopped this with me.

Just saw this – couldn’t be more honored to be on this list. Very cool. Thanks so much to Adrian Shotbolt for reading and for digging. The Grim reader reviewed Aletheia way back when – here’s the full review.

Looking forward to this live workshop. Sydney’s f/sf writers: I know you’re there. Come hang out. Be with your people a couple hours a week for six weeks. It’ll be the making of you, promise.

Do you harbor a love of the fantastic, whether science fiction, horror, weird crime, urban fantasy, steampunk, magic realism and more? Are you, like the Australian legend, Terry Dowling an “imagier”, someone who loves to imagine worlds liberated from the constraints of reality? Have you a novel idea that’s out of this world, or a story that’s just a little weird? Maybe Buffy’s your idea of comfort food; or you can you recite The Raven in Elfish, or would kill to be able to write Urban Fantasy like Seanan McGuire? Is that climate change fiction novel burning a hole in your Scrivener? If so, you’re in good company. Thanks to Pulitzer Prize winners like George Saunders and Margaret Atwood, epic fantasists like Neal Stephenson, Brandon Sanderson, and George RR Martin, or the quietly off-kilter Kelly Link and our very own Margo Lanagan, the walls between genre and literary fiction have come down and there has never been a better time to write, read or publish stories that are out of this world.